When comparing ENIGMA Development Environment vs Panda3D, the Slant community recommends Panda3D for most people. In the question“What are the best 100% free and easy game engines for beginners?”Panda3D is ranked 6th while ENIGMA Development Environment is ranked 21st. The most important reason people chose Panda3D is:

The liberal license allows use of the engine for any purpose without restrictions or royalties.

Pros

Pro

Raw C++ power and GML accessibility

Almost full support for GML,The ability to create and access C++ types, templates, and functions, compile DLLs and other C/C++ scripts

Pro

Cross platform

Support for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Pro

Compatible with GameMaker

Enigma can support over 90% of gamemaker's GML language

Pro

Friendly user interface

besides the powerful combination between GML and C++, beginners can also use drag and dropping.

Pro

Free and Open Source

Pro

Faster than GameMaker

Written in C++, many features have been demonstrated running much faster than interpreted equivalents in GameMaker (up to 10-20 times faster than GM 8.1).

Pro

Under active development

Changes are made daily to add new functions/fixing bugs.

Pro

Helpful error messages

A full stack trace with available cores and memory information as well as operating system and Java version including file names and number is generated whenever an exception is encountered, with a handy link to submit the issue to GitHub.

Pro

Free, open-source, and permissive license

The liberal license allows use of the engine for any purpose without restrictions or royalties.

Pro

Will be very easy for developers already familiar with Python

Although it's possible to use only C++ to program in Panda3D, all its power is available to the Python scripting language, while not trading in performance since the performance-critical parts are implemented in C++.

It has a powerful binding layer that exposes the vast majority of the API via Python-based interfaces.

Pro

Supports most popular physics engines

Panda3D has in-depth integration with industry standard physics engines such as Bullet, NVIDIA PhysX and ODE, but also offers a simpler built-in physics engines that will cover more basic needs.

Pro

Flexible scene and object hierarchy system

Creating weird world constructs is generally a breeze. The node system the engine runs with allows to build self-looping worlds and, on large scale, non-Euclidean scenes without having to introduce a huge amount of custom code.

Pro

Powerful profiling and debugging tools

Panda3D has a suite of powerful tools to help track down performance bottlenecks, memory leaks and examine internal state.

Pro

Supports browser deployment

Panda3D offers web plug-ins that allow deployment of an application to all major browsers. A WebGL port is in the works as well.

Cons

Con

A few bugs & glitches

Because Enigma is under very rapid development, with new functions added almost daily, some bugs and unexaplainable glitches can happen, though they also gets patched quickly.

Con

No code refactoring

Like any C++ based programs, the ability to refactor is limited. However, the new Ide for engima will support a few refactoring cababilities

Con

No unified editing program

Unlike Unity and Unreal, Panda3D doesn't currently offer a single, unified editing program in which objects can simply be dragged in and assigned properties (although third-party solutions are available). Developers are expected to design their scenes in a modelling program like Maya or Blender instead, and import them into Panda3D using Python code.

Con

Direct3D support is behind

Direct3D support not up to par with OpenGL support, only version 9 is supported

Con

A lot of the pollution comes from storing global state. Instead, you can store and update the global state of a namespace instead. As for the built-in pollution, you can make a wrapper that backs up builtins, imports pandas and then restores builtins, though this may not work as pandas almost certainly uses it's extra builtins to work. The best thing to do would be to explicitly import the same objects that are in the builtins over the top of the modified builtin namespace, although it doesn't remove the code smell, it helps to make things look less (if not at all) magic.

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